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Education Technology Hardware

The Raspberry Pi Turns One 81

Posted by timothy from the leap-year-birth-means-it's-only-point-two-five dept.
hypnosec writes "The Raspberry Pi turned one yesterday. Raspberry Pi was first launched on 29 February 2012 in the UK and it was received with a huge amount of enthusiasm by students and researchers alike. The Pi has had quite an eventful year, with researchers building a Raspberry Pi cluster; release of an official turbo mode patch; a 512 MB RAM upgrade; the launch of a Pi Store; sales of over a million units; and release of the Minecraft Pocket Edition."
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The Raspberry Pi Turns One More

The Raspberry Pi Turns One

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  • Hard to believe (Score:4, Insightful)

    by phantomfive ( 622387 ) on Saturday March 02, 2013 @03:40AM (#43052785) Journal
    I've seen so many stories about it here on Slashdot, it's hard to believe it's only a year. Feels like a decade.
    • At the bottom of this page should be a link marked "submit article". If you want /. content more to your liking, click it.

    • I'd say it feels more like a week. After a decade, people probably won't even know (or remember) what the thing is.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      They have put more than a million little computers into the hands of hackers and makers, some of whom still read and submit on Slashdot. Together we can drive this "techie" scum off our whine blog.

  • Fascinating! And congratulations (Score:5, Insightful)

    by demon driver ( 1046738 ) on Saturday March 02, 2013 @04:11AM (#43052867) Journal

    Some of these days I'll probably get one just for fun...

    Now that the Raspberry Pi even has its own "Raspbmc" XBMC distribution, I could just as well have used one for my living-room audio/video needs instead of the cheap netbook I bought. (Which was no bad choice either, although driver issues forced me to use Windows instead of Linux, which otherwise would have been just perfect.)

    What makes it so fascinating: it's extremely cheap, it's a great gadget for learning and experimenting with hard- and software, and at the same time it's powerful enough to be employed for quite some serious real-world computing tasks.

    And by the way, in a world that is being choked to death by an economic system based on profit maximization, forcing more and more people to tighten their belts even in the rich industrialized regions while the objective requirements for universal affluence and well-being, i.e. resources, productivity and workforce, have never been available in such an abundance, inventions like the Raspberry Pi will probably become more and more important for people.

    • Re:Fascinating! And congratulations (Score:4, Informative)

      by slickepott ( 733214 ) on Saturday March 02, 2013 @04:34AM (#43052913)

      I just got my little Pi less than two weeks ago and it also does what I want.
      Serves as a web server / home server connected to an external HDD.
      Web server being more for testing stuff and sharing with friends so it can handle the load.

      Old solution was a Core 2 Duo. Noisy and eating more energy.
      So far I'm happy and might buy another to see more of what it can do.

      • I'm running mine as primarily an XBMC box for my TV, pulling streams. However over the months I've used it for more and more stuff via ssh and I'm now running transmission-daemon on it as my torrent server. It performs flawlessly apart from the odd time I'll be watching something in HD and simultaneously have a 500K download but I'm almost positive that's more to do with the slow flash memory I'm using with it.

        They're a great device. A close friend who is an old-school programmer has had his running non-st

    • Up to now, I've brought 3.

      I got my first one because of the GPIO... What is ironic, since I stilll haven't had time to use it. But I've put Raspbmc for putting it to some use while I get the time, and I probably won't be able to ever unplug it from the TV again. Then I've brought other two, that are still packaged, and will be plugged on other TVs while not in use (it's easier to unplug things from those other TVs). I tought about replacing my home server with another one, but it still doesn't have enough R

  • /me queues Kool and the Gang - Celebration ..... on mpd that runs on this r-pi

    What an amazing piece of hardware!

  • Still no port of Elite? Preferably done by Braben himself.

  • There are two great source to get stuff for your pi now too. The first everybody knows: http://store.raspberrypi.com/ and the other is http://www.thinkpenguin.com/ (which sells wifi cards and bluetooth adapters that work out of the box!)

  • The aboslute best thing about the Pi... (Score:5, Informative)

    by CaptainOfSpray ( 1229754 ) on Saturday March 02, 2013 @05:41AM (#43053041)
    is the general purpose I/O pins that enable you to read, write, or drive many sorts of real-world device (thermometers, pressure gauges, GPS, servos, motors, etc etc). This feature, in a device that can talk to the internet, opens up a world of possibilities. So the flow of creativity around the Pi from people of all ages and walks of life is just awe-inspiring.

    So don't see the Pi as just another computer like your desktop or your laptop.

    • That could be useful. I was not aware they had general purpose I/O but so do many Arduinos. I'm assuming a couple dry contact digital inputs and maybe an A/D 10-12 bit converter. Throw in zigbee and battery pack I could see this being useful. Problem is I still don't really wouldn't want to have to wire these things all over the place so wireless is valuable. Not sure what life it would have on battery though probably pretty short since its general purpose.

      Not ready to replace my wireless Omega sensors b

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by rephlex ( 96882 )

      Instead of putting up with the buggy and underpowered Raspberry Pi you could just spend $15 and use GPIO with your existing computer: http://www.hardkernel.com/renewal_2011/products/prdt_info.php?g_code=G135390529643 [hardkernel.com]

      • Ok, so you're saying that it makes sense to risk frying a $500 laptop instead of a $25 Pi? Riiiight.

        And when you say "underpowered", that's because you hadn't realised that the SoC was designed to go into hi-def PVRs or BluRay players, so it has a muscular GPU, and the "underpowered" ARM CPU was an afterthought...and you haven't kept up with the news, that a guy at UCL is using the Pi to analyse MRI brain scans, which he will be able to do significantly faster when the library that supports the GPU arri

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by rephlex ( 96882 )

          Ok, so you're saying that it makes sense to risk frying a $500 laptop instead of a $25 Pi? Riiiight.

          Only an idiot would connect something capable of damaging their computer directly to it. This is what opto-isolators are for.

          And when you say "underpowered", that's because you hadn't realised that the SoC was designed to go into hi-def PVRs or BluRay players, so it has a muscular GPU, and the "underpowered" ARM CPU was an afterthought...and you haven't kept up with the news,

          You're making an incorrect assumption. I say the Raspberry Pi is underpowered because there are similar SoCs available that have ARM Cortex A8 or A9 CPUs in them which are clocked higher than the older ARM1176JZF-S CPU in the Pi and which support the newer ARMv7 architecture versus the Pi's ARMv6. This is a big deal since ARMv7 CPUs can run at their full potential using standard ar

  • I'm exploring efficient intuitive ways of programming my Dorothy, my pi. As a 32 bitter its way faster than the 486 I learned linux on. And the 486 was fast enough to be fit for purpose. Being spoilt with speed has led us up a blind alley where pooters can't keep up despite bashing their heads on quantum physics limitations. We need proper efficiency, not the crap we have today

  • I bought a couple... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by MMC Monster ( 602931 ) on Saturday March 02, 2013 @07:01AM (#43053207)

    I bought a couple just to play around with on the home network.

    I am using one as an XBMC player in the kids room. It works fine, no problems. Surprising, considering how underpowered it is compared to the Atom-based computers I'm using elsewhere to run XBMC.

    The other I am using as a fileserver. It's not set up in a RAID, but it gets quite good performance. So good, in fact, that I am using it for daily use to serve media throughout the house instead of the Netgear ReadyNas Duo that I originally bought for the job. (The Raspberry Pi has better throughput on both reads and writes when using ssh protocol. It also supports hard drives over 2TB.)

    As a plus, I'm now completely comfortable dealing with a headless system. :-)

    • I also have a couple. Quite useful too. (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Robert Frazier ( 17363 ) on Saturday March 02, 2013 @08:53AM (#43053491) Homepage

      One is a dedicated NTP (Network Time Protocol) server, with an attached GPS (Global Positioning System) receiver (Trimble Resolution T). The receiver puts a PPS (Pulse Per Second) on a GPIO (General Purpose In Out) pin. Using out-of-the-box NTP software, it is aligned to UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) with an offset of less than 1 microsecond. I had the GPS receiver in a much busier computer, but there was too much fluctuation, so the accuracy wasn't as good. In particular, the other box did CPU stepping, which is bad for for this sort of thing.

      The other Raspberry PI is also a single purpose appliance (for now). Using some of the features of pulseaudio, I stream music via multicast and RTP (Real Time Protocol). A Raspberry PI is hooked up to some active speakers (via a USB soundcard). The Raspberry sits around listening for the multicast, and plays what it gets. I did it this way, using pulseaudio multicast, so that all the music players in the house are in sync (as far as my hearing can tell).

      From my point of view, what makes the Raspberry PI attractive is that it is reasonably inexpensive, reasonably power frugal, reasonably well documented, and has strong support. All this makes it pretty much ideal when turning a general purpose computer into an appliance, with the possibility of changing its use in the future, or adding uses.

      Best wishes,
      Bob

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by wmorrow ( 16909 )
      What sort of hard drive is connected to your fileserver? I'm thinking of doing this, but wonder about the reliability of a consumer-grade external USB connected drive. You're unlikely to lose data, but won't the USB-SATA interface cook itself if left on forever?

      • I have a seagate 3TB external drive.

        Since the system only serves files in the house and I'm not constantly hitting it, the drive sleeps most of the time.

  • Any idea which Linux distro(s) comes w/ this? Which ones are supported? How about other non-Linux OSs, such as NetBSD or Minix? I read that Minix is developing a version of 3.2.1 for ARM. This platform would ideally need a lightweight OS, and something like Minix or Tiny-Core Linux.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      There are versions of Debian, one of which is the dedicated Raspbian distribution, built for the pi, Arch and RiscOS, as well as Bodhi and some other bits and pieces.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rmcd ( 53236 ) *

      The first link here [lmgtfy.com] is a place to start.

  • I have been working with my Raspberry Pi for about a month. The more I look at it, the more it has potential for my fellow network engineers as a test tool. When you are testing access through a firewall, the RPi can be used as a test host before you expose a system to the outside world. I have also setup my RPi for use as a console server to network devices that have a serial console port. I am also working a series on my website showing how to use the RPi as a GPS NTP server. I have over 30 ideas of

  • The pcDunio is just like a Raspberry Pi, but...

    * 1GHz ARM Cortex A8
    * 1GB RAM
    * 2GB Onboard Flash (no SD card required for software, and faster!).
    * Mali 400 graphics core
    * Way more on-board GPIO, including analogue inputs

    Home page is here [pcduino.com]

    Ordered one today from Sparkfun... US$59. A little bit more expensive, but no GertBoard or SD card required.

  • I checked a few weeks ago and no place in the US had any to sell. I'd love one, but i had to go with arduino instead.

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